Inside Cold Kitchen: Caroline Eden Reveals the Surprising Secrets Behind a Year of Global Culinary Adventures
AF: Of all the books you read, in researching Cold Kitchen, which was your favourite and why?
CE: In all of my books I always try to bring in a couple of writers who I feel have fallen by the wayside over the years and who ought to be better known. For Cold Kitchen I fell in love with the work of Carla Grissmann. Her book, Dinner of Herbs: Village Life in Turkey in the 1960s was recently re-published by Eland Publishing who are based in London and give new life to old books. Grissmann is remembered in certain circles for helping to safeguard and catalogue the holdings of Kabul’s National Museum of Afghanistan in the 1970s, but it is in the pages of her book, outlining a year spent in rural Anatolia in the 1960s, that her impressions and ideas best live on. Leaving behind a job at the Jerusalem Post when she was in her late thirties, and arriving at the tiny farming hamlet of Uzak Köy, she recounts ‘non-stop meals’ and sitting with the village women ‘packed together on the floor in an incredible confusion of laughter and chatter, eating walnuts, apples, sticky pink and white candies’. Wonderful, evocative writing.
